Please ask your library to order my new book, Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child. It us about the bureaucratization of our schools, and the commodification of our children–and about the paradox of our humanistic dreams for schools clash with the cold rationalism of the bureaucratic order. A sample chapter is available from the British web-site of the publisher here
The way that book publishing works, means that on October 16, the hardcover version is released, which is designed for libraries. The cost is $90 directly from the publisher, and $77 from Amazon.com. My hope is that a paperback designed for classroom adoptions and individual purchases will be out in a about a year. That’s how academic publishing works!
I have worked on the book for the last four years or so. Despite the ponderous title, much of the book reflect my thoughts about my own education, and that of my children. Much of it reflects my frustrations with mass public schooling, but more importantly it puts the subject of schooling into the larger perspective of what the sociology of education in the modern world.
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.